SpotOn
Restaurant-focused, and one of the few vendors here publishing both the software price and the card rate on the same page. Four published options: All-In at $0/station/mo with card-present at 2.79% + $0.20, POS Essentials at $55/station/mo with card-present at 2.45% + $0.15, a custom-priced Build Your Own, and a Core Bundle at $50/mo plus 20 basis points of gross payment volume capped at $200. Keyed transactions run 3.79% + $0.20 on All-In and 3.45% + $0.15 on Essentials; American Express on Essentials is 3.19% + $0.15. The table below uses the POS Essentials pair. SpotOn does not publish device prices.
The two numbers to compare are the software fee and the rate together, because SpotOn sells them as a pair. All-In drops the $55/station software fee in exchange for a card rate 34 basis points higher and a nickel more per transaction, so All-In wins at low volume and Essentials wins above it. Working the two published pairs against each other, the crossover lands between about $5,700/mo of card volume per station at an $8 average ticket and about $12,500/mo at a $50 ticket. Price the pair, not the headline.
What this POS actually costs in Year 1.
*Representative buyer: 1 location · 2 terminals · $40K/mo card volume · ~600 transactions/mo.
SpotOn publishes the software fee and the card rate together, so both paths can be costed. On POS Essentials at $55/station, two stations is $110/mo of software, and processing at 2.45% + 15c on $40K/mo over 1,600 transactions is $980 + $240 = $1,220/mo: $15,960 a year. On All-In at $0/station, processing at 2.79% + 20c is $1,116 + $320 = $1,436/mo: $17,232 a year. Essentials wins by about $1,270 a year at this volume. SpotOn publishes no device prices, so neither figure carries a hardware line.
Why this POS is priced this way.
SpotOn's structural choice is to publish the pair. Most vendors here publish a software price and make you ask for the rate, or publish a rate and quote the software; SpotOn puts All-In at $0/station with 2.79% + 20c and POS Essentials at $55/station with 2.45% + 15c on the same page, which turns the decision into arithmetic instead of a negotiation. There is also a Core Bundle at $50/mo plus 20 basis points of gross payment volume capped at $200, which is a different shape again: a volume fee with a ceiling rather than a flat rate.
What first-time buyers miss.
The trap is picking All-In because it says $0. The $55/station Essentials fee buys 34 basis points off the percentage and a nickel off every transaction, and that trade turns positive at surprisingly low volume: about $5,700/mo of card volume per station at an $8 average ticket, about $10,200 at $25, about $12,500 at $50. A single station doing $40,000/mo is far past every one of those lines, so All-In is the more expensive plan for most operating restaurants despite the free software. Low average tickets reach the crossover sooner, not later, because the per-transaction difference bites hardest when there are many transactions.
Who this POS fits.
Restaurants that want the software fee and the card rate quoted together and will do the crossover arithmetic. Genuinely low-volume or seasonal operations, which is where All-In's free software actually wins. Operations that would rather pay a capped volume fee than a flat rate should ask about the Core Bundle.